Other secondary disk , ZFS or UFS?

wolffnx

wolffnx

Hi, the scenario is this:

I'Have one ssd disk of 120GB with the host FreeBSD system on it
8GB of ddr4 ram and intel corei3 procesor

and I'want to use a second disk to store files (music,movies,other files,etc)
the second disc is 1TB WD green

What is the best option for second disk? , if I'use ZFS , the second disk will use memory resources of the machine?
without doing anything, just using it
anyway, I'like to think in posible snapshots of the secondary disc to prevent data loss,but I'dont have another
1TB disk
and for other side the compression of ZFS in case of multimedia files wont do too much...

so,what do you recomend?
in this case, is there any advantage of using ZFS?
Thanks!!
 
Alain De Vos said:
I use UFS on a 6T external USB drive. Works fine.
Click to expand...

me too,after FreeBSD 11 always
use UFS
and you make backups manually?
that's is one of the points in favor of ZFS, of course,you can make crond
scheluded jobs to make the backup but you need to do full backup
 
You could make a cron job to make a UFS snapshot.
www.freebsd.org

Chapter 20. Storage

This chapter covers the use of disks and storage media in FreeBSD. This includes SCSI and IDE disks, CD and DVD media, memory-backed disks, and USB storage devices.
www.freebsd.org www.freebsd.org
 
Phishfry said:
You could make a cron job to make a UFS snapshot.
www.freebsd.org

Chapter 20. Storage

This chapter covers the use of disks and storage media in FreeBSD. This includes SCSI and IDE disks, CD and DVD media, memory-backed disks, and USB storage devices.
www.freebsd.org www.freebsd.org
Click to expand...

but the snapshot will be of the entire system? I'mean of all files
but is good to now that UFS had snapshots too
 
Alain De Vos said:
A sidenode, if a disk crashes, a snapshot does not help.
Click to expand...

:rolleyes: yeah, It happened to me 3 to 6 times..when the disk dies..it dies..
you can replace the controller with another of the same brand/model..if that dont work..rip
of course I'say to make snapshots on another external media
 
Are you worried about your data getting damaged or lost? Then use ZFS. The checksums it puts on nearly everything are the #1 defense against silent data corruption.

You are not worried about whole disk failure, or sector errors: with just one disk, you have no defense against that, so worrying about it is pointless.

If you like your data, you WILL do backups. Old joke: there are two kinds of computer users; those who religiously do backups, and those who haven't lost data yet. I have no idea what you will use as backup media: tape, second disk, clay tables, cloud, punched cards, your choice. Snapshots can be an important ingredient in your backup system. ZFS snapshots in combination with send/receive in particular make backup easy and efficient. But there are other ways to do backup too, so ZFS is not a necessity.

If you are worried about memory usage on your host (8gig is not generous), and speed, then go for UFS. But I'm going to bet that this would be very foolish: At the speeds you want (music, video), the speed of ZFS is more than adequate. If you don't believe it, do a small benchmark on your own system with your own workload.

My personal answer is kind of obvious: Other than one disk that can only be accessed from a Macintosh (and is formatted as encrypted Apple HFS), every single data disk in my household uses ZFS (for historic reasons, the boot disk of my FreeBSD machine is still UFS ... that seemed like a good idea about 5 or 8 years ago when I set it up, and it doesn't bother me much).
 
I routinely run ZFS on virtual machines with 4 GiB of memory, or less. I don't notice performance or memory contention issues. But I don't push those systems very hard. So your usage is a key consideration. If it's casual, ZFS should be fine, and will give quite superior functionality.

You have no disk redundancy, and one lost disk means you lose what ever was on it. ZFS or UFS makes no difference. ZFS has better protection, and might give you an early warning of pending failure but so might smartd(8).

In your situation, I would think about backups as I was designing the system. But that's stretching the scope of your question.
 
I performed a small speed test with my external USB drive comparing UFS / OpenZFS
Copying /usr/ports:
->UFS : 122s
->ZFS: 81s
Removing this directory:
->UFS: 48s
->ZFS: 33s

ZFS is clearly more performant.
Note :This does not tell you what happens on power outage or memory exhaustion.

PS: openzfs is buggy.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top